Analyzing data using GDAL

[Tyler Mitchell]

Howdy,
I wrote an old program that recursively looks through folders on a given
drive, searching for various types of data. I would like to this using
GDAL and OGR instead (because I know ANYTHING has to be faster than ArcInfo
AML which I used!). Initially I've been trying to use Perl, but I find I
resort to system() calls which I bet is very efficient. I basically take
every folder or file and want to find out whether or not it matchs GDAL/OGR
supported data types. To date I just used gdalinfo/ogrinfo to see if the
output gives me an error or not - I know this is probably very lame. Do I
have to jump into Python to do more, or can I get at stuff via Perl or
simple bash? I see all the docs point to python or c++ right? I'm not
confident at either so I'm looking for something easy to use :)
Any suggestions?
I should say that my application basically makes inserts into a database
that catalogues of all the spatial data on a given drive. I'm using
GDAL/OGR in order to make it portable and open source, but need some help
getting going.

Tyler